Save for the bridge
The FIRE crowd has been running the same math for decades: stash 25x your annual expenses, ride the 4% rule, retire at 40, coast until 90. It’s a beautiful spreadsheet. It’s also a spreadsheet built for a world that’s ending.
The assumption underneath every retirement calculator is that the next fifty years look roughly like the last fifty. Wages grow modestly. Healthcare gets more expensive. You’ll need to fund decades of consumption out of capital because your labor stops being worth much after 65.
None of that survives contact with what’s coming.
If you take the AI labs at their word — and the curves at their face — we’re somewhere between three and fifteen years from systems that can do most cognitive work better and cheaper than any human. The cost of intelligence is collapsing toward zero. The cost of physical goods follows shortly after, once that intelligence gets pointed at robotics, materials, and energy. Whatever your retirement number is, it’s denominated in a currency whose purchasing power is about to do something very strange.
So the question isn’t “how do I fund 50 years of retirement.” The question is: how do I get to the other side of the transition?
That’s a fundamentally different problem. You don’t need 25x. You need:
- Enough runway to not panic-sell your time during the weird middle years, when labor markets are getting chewed up faster than safety nets adapt.
- Enough optionality to reposition when an industry you’re in evaporates in 18 months.
- Enough health to still be around when the abundance shows up. This one is underrated. The boring stuff — sleep, lifting, not dying in a car — has a higher expected return than your index fund right now.
- Enough relationships that you have somewhere to land if the economic ground moves. Post-scarcity or not, the people who love you remain the actual portfolio.
The bridge, not the retirement. Maybe two to five years of expenses in something liquid. Skills that compound in a world with abundant intelligence (taste, judgment, trust, the ability to direct AI well). A body that still works in 2035.
The grim version of this argument is “nothing matters, spend it all.” That’s not what I’m saying. The transition could take longer than the optimists think. It could be more turbulent than the doomers fear. Hedging is still rational.
But the specific shape of FIRE — defer everything, optimize for a 40-year drawdown starting at 45 — is optimizing for a world that probably won’t exist. The retirement you’re saving for assumes scarcity that won’t be there. The decades you’re sacrificing now are the last decades where your pre-abundance experiences are even legible.
Save enough to not be scared. Spend the rest on getting to the bridge healthy, curious, and connected.